Various methods and standards for the electronic archiving of data objects are known in the art, the ArchiSig project for example. It is envisaged here that a plurality of data objects or hash values assigned thereto are arranged in a queue. An archive time stamp is then created in that a reduced hash tree is generated for all elements (data objects/hash values) in the queue and signed. When there are large and/or very many elements, it may take several hours before archiving is complete. It is not possible in this case for archiving targets within a predetermined time to be met. Instead, archiving takes place “over the course of the day”, which is also entirely adequate for some applications.
The ArchiSig project is described in Technical Guideline 03125 of the Federal Office for Information Security.